ITSM Then, Cognitive Service Management Now: The Future of Service

Meet Enterprise DX Company (EDX), a large, multinational—and, yes, fictional—corporation in the consumer goods sector. EDX had a problem: Its help desk was stuck using outdated ITSM tools and processes, and service delivery was sagging under the business demands of the EDX organization.

The reasons for this might sound familiar to you. The firm was in the midst of a series of bold digital transformation initiatives to ensure it remained competitive in spite of the very real threat of disruption. This meant significant, ongoing changes to business processes and the IT portfolio powering them. EDX knew its existing ITSM solution—and its manual processes and tools that required intensive human effort—would not be able to scale nor move fast enough to meet business requirements. The existing, legacy solution frustrated agents and customers alike while driving up service costs and maintenance efforts.

Fortunately for EDX—and the many real businesses facing similar challenges—there’s a better way: Cognitive Service Management, the next-gen solution powered by digital automation, AI, and machine learning. This transforms every layer of service delivery making it proactive and predictive, with increased accuracy, speed and cost efficiencies.

Let’s walk through EDX’s before-and-after service transformation.

Before Cognitive Service Management

ITSM at EDX was very resource-intensive and largely manual. Both service delivery and issue resolution followed a very procedural, reactive process that produced slow and/or inaccurate services. Consider the typical path of a ticket: A user calls the help desk; an L1 agent creates a ticket; the agent investigates the ticket to figure out possible remediation step(s); the agent categorizes the ticket; the agent routes the ticket to the assumed support group; the issue gets resolved. All this assumes that at each step of the process, the right decisions are being made and no matter what, it is all very time consuming.

As EDX’s business evolved, ticket volume—as well as the costs of managing it—began to rise. Service desk agents struggled to keep up as well. EDX lacked a centralized ticketing system to prioritize and route service requests, and the system wasn’t mobile-friendly for end-users.

Several critical factors led to this point:

Multi-cloud support: EDX adopted a multi-cloud strategy and embraced containers, microservices architecture, and other fundamentals of cloud-native development. That meant the help desk had to support an increasingly distributed and complex set of infrastructure environments and applications. This also meant EDX needed 360-degree visibility of its assets across its multiple clouds.

Customer and employee expectations: EDX employees and customers alike began to expect that they could research and resolve issues on their own, using the same devices and apps they use elsewhere in their work and personal lives, from their iPhones to Skype to Slack. They wanted to easily request and receive services from IT and they wanted fast, accurate resolution, no matter how they initiated their request.

After BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management

BMC Helix Cognitive service management embeds the power of AI and related disciplines such as machine learning into every phase of the service delivery lifecycle. By adopting a cutting-edge CSM solution, EDX transformed its ITSM from a set of reactive, manual tools and processes to a proactive and predictive approach that empowers the organization’s ongoing digital transformation. Here’s what happened after EDX adopted Cognitive Service Management:

End-user experience: Users now get what they need, when they need it, and how they want it—all with a consistent, intuitive experience whether they’re requesting IT service or a new desk chair. They’re happier as a result, thanks to faster and more accurate outcomes.

Agent experience: Service desk agents are no longer juggling a dozen different tickets—about issues that can be handled via self-service or automation—all at once. Instead, they can focus on more strategic priorities. Forrester estimates that self-service can deflect up to 25% of tickets and another 10% through intelligent chatbots, which translates to major cost savings.

IT Ops experience: The team gets full visibility of assets across its hybrid, multi-cloud environment, all through a single pane of glass. This enables greater reliability and security even as the organization deploys changes faster and more frequently.

Line-of-business experience: Departments get customizable ITSM workflows that fit their service delivery needs, all from a centralized service catalog. Employees get what they need from HR, facilities, and other lines of business in an intuitive, consistent manner, without creating additional burdens on IT.

All of this means EDX is now delivering service with:

Greater speed: Even as complexity grows, cognitive technologies, like virtual chatbots and greater automation throughout the portfolio, enable faster service delivery throughout the enterprise.

Greater accuracy: Cognitive and automation technologies improve accuracy by removing manual steps and reducing inaccurate routing, along with other errors.

Lower costs: CSM improves speed and accuracy while keeping costs in check—delivering an incredible ROI—because the help desk can redirect human resources away from low-level, repetitive tasks to more valuable work.

EDX might be fictional, but the challenges it faced are very real. Even the best legacy ITSM tools need a reboot for the digital age, and BMC’s vision is for enterprises to embrace Cognitive Service Management—the engine that powers their transformation from the online enterprise of yesterday to the digital enterprise of today to the cognitive enterprise of tomorrow.

About the author

Kellyann Lanspa

Kelly is Principal, Solutions Marketing for BMC Helix Remedyforce. She has extensive experience in all aspects of marketing with an emphasis on product marketing and demand generation. Kelly has marketed a wide variety software products for the datacenter management and agile developer markets.